MANAGING CORPORATE ETHICS

A can't-hurt handbook for executives that promises (pleasingly if unpersuasively) that ethical conduct can enhance the performance of an already well-run enterprise. In an apparent effort to impose a measure of order on a subject that's as amorphous as it is equivocal, Aguilar (Harvard Business School) relies on anecdotal evidence gathered from 20 widely respected companies that differ as to size, complexity, and operations. Their ranks encompass the blue-chip likes of Armstrong World Industries, Gray Research, Dow-Jones, General Mills, Hewlett- Packard, Johnson & Johnson, Lincoln Electric, Procter & Gamble, ServiceMaster, and Texas Instruments. Among other common denominators, the author notes that the firms in his sample tend to be happy ships whose officers steer them clear of improprieties or moral dilemmas and deal effectively with such problems as they arise. Drawing mainly on material developed at his case-study firms, Aguilar offers unexceptional if general guidance on the importance of top management's commitment to high behavioral standards, the difficulties typically attendant to getting from principle to practice (e.g., via policy statement), ensuring that benchmark requirements do not wind up more honored in the breach than the observance, and otherwise elevating or renewing an organization's ethical character. At best, he earns a Scotch verdict on his claim that consistently and purposefully good conduct improves results. The author also seems to have accepted the arguable, expansive stakeholder concept—i.e., that corporations have categorical obligations to varied constituencies (creditors, customers, host communities, vendors, et al.) on a par with the duties owed their owners (meaning investors). In brief, then, a series of object lessons documenting in no great depth how presumptively model concerns deal with the ethical challenges that are a workaday consequence of being in business.